Google Pagerank Made-Up Mayhem

There’s a veritable storm of blog posts going around right now regarding a sudden drop in Toolbar Pagerank for a bunch of sites. Marketing Pilgrim, Problogger, Center Networks, Blogstormand even the normally thoughtful Copyblogger (sorry Brian – my bad) are all sounding a bit shrill. Let me clue you in to something:

Toolbar pagerank is a modified, manipulated, out of date number. It’s an attempt to take a point value ranging from 0 into the billions (trillions?) and assign it a number from 1-10. Forget about it. Google has long reported that the pagerank displayed in their toolbar is completely inaccurate.

Actual pagerank is a number assigned each indexed page on the internet. It falls on a huge scale. And, it no doubt includes dozens of factors that Google’s added since they first developed the concept. You don’t know this one. You can’t. So don’t worry about it.

Instead, worry about your rankings.

Some folks are concerned that they can’t charge as much for their ads now, because their pagerank dropped. If you’re basing your advertising values on pagerank, you’re nuts. Switch to pageviews, visits and time-on-site, instead.

Here’s when you should worry about a pagerank change:

Your pagerank drops to 0 and stays there. Ignore this if you’re a brand-new site. It can take months for toolbar pagerank to stabilize.

A pagerank drop is accompanied by a sudden drop in actual rankings. Your search ranking is what really matters, right?!

Ian Lurie is CEO and founder of Portent and the EVP of Marketing Services at Clearlink. He's been a digital marketer since the days of AOL and Compuserve (25 years, if you're counting). He's recorded training for Lynda.com, writes regularly for the Portent Blog and has been published on AllThingsD, Smashing Magazine, and TechCrunch. Ian speaks at conferences around the world, including SearchLove, MozCon, Seattle Interactive Conference and ad:Tech. He has published several books about business and marketing: One Trick Ponies Get Shot, available on Kindle, The Web Marketing All-In-One Desk Reference for Dummies, and Conversation Marketing. Follow him on Twitter at portentint, and on LinkedIn at LinkedIn.com/in/ianlurie.